This week in the saga

The campaign is interrupted by weather. A hurricane comes ashore on Thursday night and walks six hundred miles inland, and by the weekend whole valleys in the southern mountains are cut off — no roads, no lines, no way to call out. On Sunday, at half past twelve, he posts a prayer: the archangel, defense in battle, the snares of the devil, word for word and nothing else. On Monday he flies into Valdosta with truckloads of fuel and water and stands in a debris field where a family's house used to be. Nine minutes before that post he sends another one, and it is about himself: they will not give him the agents he needs, they are using them elsewhere, and the man who wants him dead is watching. Two rifles in ten weeks have made the perimeter part of the story.